Chile and Peru fight merciless hacker war

Official websites hit as fish crisis escalates

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Long gone are the good old days when obstreperous Latin American nations would invade each other over a World Cup qualifying match* - nowadays your belligerent sons of Cortez are battling it out in cyberspace.

Take if you will Peru and Chile, currently engaged in a no-holds-barred hack war in which no government website is spared the attention of e-nationalists determined to hurl insults at their cross-border rivals.

The background is this: according to the Beeb, "Chile and Peru are currently embroiled in a diplomatic dispute over fishing waters in the Pacific Ocean". Fair enough. Rather more serious though, is the punch-up over which nation owns the rights to Pisco, a drink which "Peru claims as its own but is trademarked, produced and marketed in greater volume by Chile".

Local media reports say the first strike came when a Peruvian hacker Cyber Alexis entered the Chilean National Emergency Office's website and declared: "We do as we like with our policy and our ocean" and "Nobody can match ceviche [lemon-cured fish] and pisco, or equal their quality."

Swift retaliation followed from a Chilean activist who made merry on Peru's judiciary website, including the inflammatory: "We fight for what is ours. The ocean and pisco are Chilean!"

The warring nations were last week trying to restore their websites to normality and shore up their defences again future incursion. The matter of whose fish is better remains unresolved.